Supercomputing was a new concept when IBM created Deep Blue, the monster machine that successfully defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Peter Crane, a lead PC assembly technician at Utah's Linux NetworX, is part of a team that built a clustered computer for a national research laboratory in California.

Today — and possibly only briefly, managers admit — a Utah company lays claim to having made the world's fastest Linux-based computer.

And the machine, put together by Linux NetworX Inc., is a behemoth. About the size of a tennis court, it provides 11 trillion calculations a second, according to Clark Roundy, vice president of marketing for Linux NetworX. "To put that into perspective, it would take more than 11,000 PCs a day to do the same thing. Or one system 30 years to do what this system can do in a day."